My favorite sci-fi game is probably Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. ME1 was the only game in the series that I enjoyed, but it still felt like a de-StarWars-ified KOTOR game.

I believe this to a degree based on my personal experiences with being thought of as either a brilliant wizard or evil hacker for unimpressive things. It even would happen at different jobs until my current job where my boss is the opposite. he thinks that anything and everything is possible and should be "easy" despite being technically illiterate. His new AI obsession has made it so much worse. I actually miss the super annoying "OMG you can do that? You're a wizard/hacker/demigod!" days.

In my head, I am picturing the Goatse guy popping up in the corner of the screen like the "TOASTY!" guy from Mortal Kombat.

I only switched to an AMD GPU this year after 5 years using Nvidia cards. I assure you my situation is more common than yours. Your experience is also why people keep saying "Nvidia is OK now", meaning quite clearly that it was absolutely not great before.

With Nvidia, once you got it installed and stable (if you were lucky your distro made that happen), it might stay good for many months to even a year. Then BLAM, some update catastrophically breaks your system and you're stuck booting from a thumb drive trying to un-fuck your system. This was especially rough for me as I used my main system for work and gaming, so it had my Nvidia GPU in it.

My system has been smooth sailing since I switched to AMD. The drivers are in the kernel so it should be about as easy as it gets and shouldn't be as finicky about which distro or DE you use. Now keep in mind that I am also on a top 7000 card, not a 9000 card, so I can't speak to them from experience, but I haven't heard any horror stories.

I was already as done with Microsoft as a person could be, but this is so disgusting.

Nice, thanks. The Steam backlog must grow.

That tracks with what I have seen with my own cards. I suspect some of it is because there were specific driver versions that many distros favored for stability reasons that may have left some performance on the table, but that's just my personal speculation.

As others have said, Nvidia cards are OK in Linux now, though AMD is better assuming you aren't doing anything AI adjacent with the card.

Sceptre was more of a TV company in the past, but over the last decade or so have definitely moved more into the monitor business. I have actually owned 5 different Sceptre TVs over the last 20 years, but back in the day it was because they were some of the least expensive LCD televisions on the market.

The 9000 cards don't offer much of value other than running a bit cooler IMO. The fact is that the good 7000 cards aren't really available in retail anymore, so it only matters to people (like me) that already have a good 7000 series card. If I didn't have one and was looking for a new card I would have no problem picking up a 9000 series card as long as the price wasn't ridiculous.

I also bought a Sceptre "dumb TV" within the last year or so and highly recommend it. I had been recommending it over and over, but recently I found that the model I bought was no longer offered. I hope Sceptre didn't abandon them.

Give me a full tank of Others please!